Thanks for your reply. Yes, I realize 5 minutes is aggressive but our lawyers sometimes find even that is not frequent enough if they happen to crash. In any event, the issue is one of being unable to work in a document during the autorecover and 5-10 seconds seems like a lifetime when you're in the middle of editing, typing, etc.

Understood (I've worked in the legal field for more than 26 years). Still, the short interval could be part of the problem.

Does the autorecover in Word 2010 on Windows 7 seem to be taking longer than it did (does) in Word 2003 on Windows XP? Does the firm use a DMS? Are you rolling out any other new software or making changes to hardware that could be slowing things down?

The path for Autorecover files is local: c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word .
Default file location is a network share.
We are also using a DMS (DocsOpen) and have set our default file format to Word97-2003 in order to be able to save to the DMS.
In addition, we are using custom addins for numbering and comparison (leveraging MS track changes).
Hardware is 32 bit Windows 7, 4G RAM, Intel Core Duo 3.00 GHz

Do you have the same delay if you are working on a non-DMS document, for example a document saved to MyDocuments on the local drive? Does DocsOpen open the document from the network location, or does it copy the document to the local (C drive and open that?

On the Advanced page of Word Options, in the Save section, is "Allow background saves" checked? That *should* prevent Word from freezing up while saves are happening.

Also, if saves of ordinary documents are taking 5 to 10 seconds, something is definitely wrong in the configuration. I'm using a similar but slower computer (Core2 Duo 2.40 GHz, 3 GB RAM, and not the fastest hard drive on the block), routinely working on documents of 2 MB to 10 MB, with AutoRecover set to 1 minute. The auto saves occur in under 1 second -- if I blink, I miss them -- and I can just keep typing.

Try running a hard drive analysis program to see if there are bad sectors or retries that are slowing the write function.